What Is Geotagging? And Why Is It A Useful SEO Practice?

Making your web page rank in the top spot for internet searches is an ongoing challenge among you and your business competitors. Google, Bing and others alike all use different methods to determine which websites they will serve up to searchers and these algorithms are ever-changing. Business owners are often too busy running their business to actually realise that they might be slipping in terms of SEO (search engine optimisation). They may not realise until it’s too late and they start losing customers. So what's the best way that you can adapt to these ever-changing circumstances?

Keeping up with marketing trends is tough and staying ahead of the game with your SEO is tougher. Today we’re going to take a look into one SEO practice; geotagging.

Doing this will definitely give you an advantage against others and often help you to rank higher in search engines. But remember, SEO is made up of loads of different elements and this is just one of them. Take a look at our other SEO blogs for more information.

What is geotagging and why is it important?

Geotagging is the act of essentially labelling your images with precise global positioning information. Information such as the latitude and longitude of where the image was captured or what it signifies to a website or an image that is found online. 

It’s the most common way to embed this sort of location-specific information into your website typically done by adding it to your images and photos. This information is hidden from sight to your website visitors but it is used by search engines such as Google when they are reading and cataloguing information from different sites. 

Geotagging helps search engines reach the connection between your image and the location that is shown and where and when it was taken. The location can be set for each image in a very specific way by adding the latitude and longitude to the image. 

Geotagging isn’t a new concept, it’s been around for a very long time! Its relevance, however, is growing, in the past year or so it has very quickly gone from being a commodity to something that showed be used as often as possible. With current searches coming more and more from mobile sources, web search engines are factoring in peoples location when displaying search results. 

Also, people are getting more specific with their searches, being able to narrow down thousands of web search results to the one that is most relevant to them. Without Geotagging on your website, chances are you’re being outperformed by your competitors.  

Not ranking as highly as your competitors on search engines can have a massive negative effect on your overall business performance. Did you know that the typical CTR (Click Through Rate) for the number 1 spot on Google is roughly 31%, as you move through the top 5 searches alone that figure tends to drop a lot! With an average of just 2% CTR by spot number 8.

How Can Geotagging Be Of Benefit To Me?

Geotagging is very important when it comes to rankings based around smaller local search engine results. For example, if you’re a small carpet cleaning company in Lincoln, you’re probably not too bothered about trying to take the number 1 spot in London.  Your primary focus will be getting the people that are local to you, to find your business. The growth of your local business will be improved by getting localised results from web searches and by targeting the customers in your area, people primarily tend to search for a product when they actually need it, not usually in just a passive interest. So being in that number 1 spot locally is more beneficial to your business because you’ll attract the people that are A) Interested and B) Likely to enquire because they’re in your area.

Geotagging essentially helps to pinpoint your customers and assist in them finding you as it tells search engines that you are in their area. 

So, what other benefits can Geotagging have?

• Increasing search engine confidence scores. The location information that you have added to your image through geotagging combined with the general information of your business that should be on your website such as your services, why you do what you do and who you are as people will give a brilliant indication to search engines that you’re a reputable site and boost the SE’s overall confidence in your site.

• Increase your site’s rankings with search engines. Just having an image typically is beneficial to SE results, having that image properly optimised through geotagging, metadata and alt text will help this exponentially.

• Showing in image searches. Completing an image search on most SE’s is a lot more common than you think, ifs you have your images properly optimised they will now not only show in the search tab but the image section as well! What’s not to like?

What else can I do to add metadata to my images?

Metadata is essentially the information that search engines (SE’s) use to determine whether your website is relevant to the search and images can offer a few ways to add to the information. 

• Image title and/or file name. This one is as simple as it sounds, naming your files correctly is more important than it may seem. Usually, these should be titled with your business name and the location of the image. Don’t worry your users don’t see the file name.

• Image alt text. Many people often forget to enter the alt text. Alt-text is used to assist this with a virtual impairment by providing a very brief description of what the image is usually no more than 3-4 words. This can also be used to benefit your SEO, for example, if you have a physical store and upload an image of it to your site, you can add your address/business name to the alt text providing even more information to the search engine (SE).

• Captions and words. Some search engines use text that is located close to an uploaded image as information about what the image is. This can also be used to provide good information to the SE regarding location or a description of the image which adds further relevance to the site and image.

How Do I Geotag My Images?

The easiest way to geotag your images is to quite simply take them, take them on a smartphone or any modern GPS enabled device. Most of these devices have a geotagging feature built-in and will at the time of the shot, add the location coordinates and the named location if possible, to the image. Unless of course, you have turned off the location settings from your device. These photos can simply be uploaded straight to your website without too much hassle, you should be aware though that the smart device will only add the geotagging information to the image, it will not add the other things we spoke about earlier, such as meta descriptions and alt text. 

Typically photos that have been taken by a professional photographer will also have the geotag information attached as standard. The information is easily added using the photographers editing tool if the camera hasn’t added this information automatically. If you’re unsure if it has or not, you’ve only to ask!

If you have older photos that you want to use to geotag your images don’t worry! There are still a few ways you can add this information. But the easiest way is to simply upload that image to a piece of geotagging software, our favourite is Geoimgr. 

Where should I typically be putting my geotagged images?

There are a few main places that you should make sure that your images are geotagged but ideally, you should aim to geotag all of your images, it doesn’t do it any harm to have that data, it can only benefit so why should you miss out?

The main places that your images should be tagged are: 

• The home page of your website

• The contact page

• Any locations pages that you have on your website, specifically if you have multiple locations, you should geotag the images correctly to match the right location

• Adding this information to blog posts wouldn’t hurt if the image is suitable

Pro-tip! You should also aim to geotag any images that you upload to your Google My Business site listing. 

Can I add geotagging information to other pages of my site?

Put simply.Yes, yes you can. But it isn’t easy, it requires specific coding to be achieved. It can be worth doing if you are especially trying to rank on Bing or Yahoo as these search engines have stated that they will still use this data as a ranking factor. 

However, Google has stated that it will not use the information from geotagged pages. This is primarily because the data can be inconsistent if not installed correctly.

That being said, if you’re confident that you can efficiently install this information, it definitely will not hinder your results being there.

Get some help from the Pro’s

We understand that this can be daunting, especially to people that aren’t as ‘tech savvy’ as others. If you feel like you’d benefit with some help in optimising your website images through Geotagging, or any other aspect of your SEO for that matter, we will always be happy to help. Contact us today if you have any questions.